Dance on the Wind

17

As Titus stuffed the fired pistol into his waistband, pulling the loaded one into his right hand and drawing back its hammer, Hezekiah burst past him, through the tangle of trees and shadow toward the ring of frightened horses and slave hunters thrown into instant confusion.

There the big slave lunged through the frightened animals, landing among the two thieves standing over Beulah. Hezekiah swung a huge limb at the end of his powerful arms. Every time it cracked against one of the slavers’ bones, it rang with the smack of a maul splitting hard oak.

At the same time, James’s mount reared wildly, but he struggled it back down, wagging a second horse pistol this way, then that, trying to hold it on the black terror pummeling two of his men senseless as the woman crawled off on her belly through the leaves.

Suddenly Kingsbury leaped, snagging the famous slave hunter’s wrist, yanking, snapping his head forward to lock his teeth in that pliant web of flesh between thumb and forefinger of the hand holding the pistol, gritting his teeth together as James flung his arm up and down, fighting to free himself from the wild beast pulling him from the saddle … when the pistol went off, the muzzle flash a bright, painful flare in the darkness of that thunderstruck forest.

As Kingsbury hurtled back, arms akimbo, the leader cruelly drove his spurs into the horse’s flanks. With something close to the sound of human pain, the animal cried out as James savagely wrenched his mount’s head to the side with the reins, hammering the beast into furious motion.

Clearing the last fringe of trees surrounding that deadly clearing, Bass brought his pistol up, marking a spot on the slaver’s broad back. With the instincts of a hunter he quickly considered, then decided. Stuffing the pistol back into his waistband, he brought the longrifle up to his shoulder as he snapped the goosenecked hammer back, flicking off the greased leather sock that kept the powder dry in its pan.

He blinked. Then once more, trying desperately to clear his eyes of the swirling rain that drove down on them in dancing sheets. Unsure in that darkness, he touched off the trigger.

Thirty yards away, the slave hunter twisted to the side, arms flung up, screwing partway out of the saddle as his hands flapped down, fighting to secure a purchase on the horn, seeking to regain the reins that flopped out of reach. Boots freed from the stirrups, James hurtled from the back of that terrified animal in a low arc. He collided against the great trunk of a chestnut tree, spilling to the damp ground with a great rush of air from his lungs.

Just beyond the slaver, the horse came to a stop, gazed suspiciously from side to side, then calmly dipped its head to forage among the moidering leaves for something worth nuzzling in the way of graze.

Root was the first to reach the slave hunter, standing over him as Titus came up—trembling. Bass tried to stand just so, mindful that if he didn’t, the others would surely tell his knees were rattling like all get-out. He’d never shot a man in anger. Standing there at that moment, he finally realized his veins burned with a fire never before this hot, adrenaline pumping through them still. His mouth gone dry, he could only stare, slack-jawed, at the body sprawled on the ground.

James gurgled, something bright and dark oozing from the side of his mouth as he gazed up at the moment Ovatt came to a stop beside Bass. The slaver’s eyes rolled back to their whites for a moment, fluttering, his face contorting as if he were struggling to hold on. Then those cruel eyes appeared to brush across Root before coming to rest on Titus. They seemed to smile, laugh even—perhaps laugh at himself as he choked out something unintelligible.

Then he hacked up a great dark gob of gelling blood puffing from his mouth in a shiny bubble before he locked his eyes on Bass once more. “I didn’t think you sonsabitches’d leave the boy behind. Maybe the Negra, leave that black bastard behind for me—just to keep me off your trail … but … I should’ve known … you’d n-never … leave the boy.”

“The one you call a boy just killed you, you worthless hide hunter,” Root growled. “You realize that?”

Bass watched James take his eyes from him, to gaze down at his chest and the shiny stain oozing around that exit hole. “I do believe,” he started, gasping for air, staring cruelly back at Bass before the eyes began to roll slowly back. “Do … do believe he … he did …”

For the longest time Titus stared down at the slave hunter—numbed, unable to move, watching for any sign. Perhaps the face to twitch, his eyes to roll back and fix him with their steely gaze, maybe even see the slaver move a bit this way or that—he lay so like a disjointed rag-sock doll, the sort his mother had made for his sister years before. But nothing moved. Not a sound but the crunch of the horse nearby as it tore at the old grass, snorting and blowing aside the dying leaves with their stench of decay.

“Yep, you sure kill’t that bastard. Kill’t him dead,” Root finally said.

At first Titus wasn’t sure he’d heard Reuben speaking. The blood thundered at his ears so.

After he had worked his throat, worked his tongue around a few times before uttering a sound, Bass finally said, “I … couldn’t stand by and let ’im kill Kingsbury like he done.”

“That bastard didn’t kill me,” came the pilot’s voice.

Whirling on his heel with surprise, Titus found Kingsbury approaching, leaning on Beulah’s shoulder.

Sputtering, Bass shook his head, saying, “I saw … h-he shot you close—”

“His pistol went off right aside my face, sure enough,” Kingsbury replied, pulling a hand away from his shoulder to expose a black oval of drying blood that spidered toward the armpit. “But he didn’t hit nothing that second time—just blinded me.”

“Lookee here what the young’un here done to him” Ovatt said, his red hair sopping into the collar of his fustian coat. “Jesus God, Titus! I been one to cut my share of white men in my time—but I never out an’ out killed a white man. Jesus God!”

“Killing that there son of a sow pig ain’t really like killing a white man,” Root declared, coming forward to kneel over the body. “This’un’s no more’n a animal the boy here just put out of its misery.”

Bass watched the boatman lay a hand on the slave hunter’s chest, wait long moments, then lean forward to place an ear directly on that dark blossom of blood.

“Jesus God, Titus,” Ovatt repeated with a wag of his head. “You gone and kill’t a white man!”

“Shuddup, Heman! What the boy done ain’t murder,” Kingsbury snarled. “They was all fixing to kill us, then stuff our belly-holes full with rocks so we wouldn’t float to the top of this here bayou.”

“Hames is right,” Beulah agreed, gripping the river pilot’s arm. “Titus here done what needed doing when this son of a bitch took to running.”

They all turned upon hearing Hezekiah’s sodden steps. He had his waistband filled with pistols and carried a rifle in each hand. Shocked at the sight of an armed Negro, the three white men and one white woman stared speechless as Hezekiah came to a halt. He gazed back at each of those frightened faces, then handed the first rifle to Reuben Root.

“You need this’r more’n me,” the slave said quietly. Then Hezekiah turned to Ovatt, handing the Ohioan the other full-stocked rifle.

Titus sensed a sudden relief wash over all four of the white people standing with him.

“You take all them guns from them others?” Root inquired, gesturing toward the bodies.

Hezekiah nodded with a simple shrug. “They ain’t gonna need ’em. We might’n, somewhere down this’r road.”

“What you aim to do with them belt pistols?” Ovatt asked.

Turning to Bass, the slave answered, “He tell me what to do with them.”

“I don’t own you, goddammit!” Titus snapped, his mind burning, turning away to look down at the dead slave hunter. He’d just killed a man—how was he expected to know the answer to every goddamned question in the world right now?

“For the devil, Titus! You just can’t let a goddamned Negra have a gun,” Root squealed. “Just look at him, will you! The son of a bitch took six of them pistols off them slave hunters!”

“Give him the guns you got,” Ovatt ordered the Negro. “Titus, you take ’em from him now.”

“Why?” Titus demanded.

“I don’t want him at my back with a gun,” Root said, his eyes narrowing.

“Don’t matter to me if’n he’s got a gun at my back or not,” Bass remarked quietly, his throat burning with the first taste of gall as he looked back down and stared at that slaver’s face going ashen in the rain. Pale as limestone chalk.

Right then Bass was afraid of what he knew was about to overwhelm him. It had happened with the first animal he had ever killed, out hunting with his pap and an uncle. They had run across a rabbit—caught far from the safety of its burrow. The flop-eared critter had stopped dead in its tracks as the hunters had closed in on the clearing.

“Shoot ’im,” his uncle had ordered harshly, slamming his rifle into Titus’s hands.

Instead, the frightened and confused young boy had stared down at the cocked hammer, then gazed at the rabbit before locking his eyes on the gun once more.

“Like your uncle said, shoot ’im, Titus!” Thaddeus Bass had whispered harshly.

Still the rabbit had sat there, staring at the three humans.

Shaking like a cedar sapling beneath the onslaught of an autumn wind, Titus had dragged the big rifle to his bony shoulder, aimed as he had been taught, and gazed down that long barrel at those dark beads of eyes just beyond the front sight—then squeezed his own eyes shut and pulled the trigger.

The body was still so very warm when his dad and uncle had come back with it, slinging the rabbit against Titus’s chest. “Now skin it,” the uncle had demanded.

Feeling the animal’s heat, looking down at those eyes that had stared back at him, Bass had choked on the first flood of gall. Much as he tasted the rise of gall now, staring down at those white eyes rolled back in the slave hunter’s head.

Stumbling in his hurry to flee, he pitched over the dead man’s legs, caught himself with the rifle as crutch, and made it behind the tree as his stomach began to empty in great, volcanic waves. He was finishing the last heaves as he sensed a hand on his back.

“You feel better now?” Beulah asked.

Straightening, Titus nodded as he wiped his lower face, stinging with shame as he peered over at the others. His mouth boiled with the burn of acid as he said, “I … don’t know what come over me—”

“Don’t matter to us, none,” Kingsbury replied. “Likely it’s what happens as a natural thing, Titus. Nary a man here ever went and kill’t a white man afore. Surely we’d do the same.”

With his eyes smarting Titus tried to explain. “Thought you was … thought he’d gone and killed you.”

“You done what any man do for his friend,” the pilot replied. “You’re a good man, Titus Bass.”

“I’m glad you was here,” Ovatt declared supportively. “None of us shoot near good as that, drop that son of a bitch off a running horse.”

Beulah glanced down the backtrail, saying, “Maybe we ought’n figure on them other two coming back from Colbert’s soon.”

“She’s right,” Kingsbury said, suddenly stiffening as he peered down the road in the direction of the ford. “Likely they heard the shots.”

“Shit. I ain’t worried about the noise of them guns,” Root argued. “Likely they’ll just figure this here son of a bitch is busy killing the rest of us.”

“But soon enough them two gone back ’cross’t the river gonna find Titus and the Negra ain’t there no more. They’ll be on their way back here,” Kingsbury said.

“That’s why I say we ought’n be leaving here fast,” Beulah suggested more forcefully, pulling Kingsbury’s collar aside to inspect his bullet wound.

“What ’bout them?” Ovatt asked, holding a thumb over his shoulder. “This’un too.”

“You boys’re rivermen,” Beulah chided them. “Drag the lot of ’em off into the brush yonder. Away from the trail.”

“And them horses?” Root asked.

“I say we ride back to Kentucky, folks,” Ovatt suggested.

“Damn fine idea,” Kingsbury agreed. “Titus, you think you and Hezekiah catch up them horses afore they get too far away?”

He glanced at the slave, then nodded. “Don’t see why we can’t. I never had much to do with horses—”

“None the rest of us never did neither,” Kingsbury explained. “Figure you two can catch ’em up so we can get out of here.”

Self-consciously he licked his lips, still stinging with the sour taste of bile as the rain began to slacken. Nodding to the slave, Titus led out, heading first for that horse ridden by the dead leader of the slave hunters.

“You … you really kill them two other’ns?” Bass whispered after he had the reins in hand and they had started back toward the scene of the ambush.

Hezekiah nodded.

“Just like that?”

The slave shrugged. “I kill men afore. Annie Christmas tell me—I kill. Allays kill for her. Never before I kill for friends. These peoples here—makes no matter now. You, for first time to kill, it feel bad in here.” He tapped a long black finger against his chest. “Maybe it get better sometime for you, like it done for me. No hurt no more in here.”

“Yeah,” Bass replied as he handed the slave the reins to the horse and moved away to inch up slowly on one of the other animals.

In minutes the slave took the second set of reins to stand there gripping both horses. “Don’t think on it too hard, Titus. It could hurt.”

Titus stopped, recalling that vivid memory of his first rabbit, considering its import this day in light of all the game he had tracked, hunted, killed.

“I s’pose you’re right. Maybeso killing does get easier with time.”

Titus never did run across the sixth horse, which meant he and Hezekiah ended up riding double. Natural enough—seeing how Bass was not only the youngest among them all, but the lightest as well.

On out of that far northwestern corner of Alabama they hurried. Putting the Muscle Shoals of the Tennessee at their backs, they set off atop those horses at a punishing pace, hurrying north for the Duck River. At the end of that first long day after leaving Colbert’s Landing and the slavers far behind, Titus found half of the horses weary with exhaustion. Inside his head he heard the scolding voice of his father—prompting him to remember Thaddeus’s admonishments that a man must always pay proper heed to the care of his animals.

That night at the fire he instructed the others that from then on out they should take care not to drive the horses so hard.

“You … you’re serious! You want us just to walk ’em?” Root demanded in a scornful tone.

Titus nodded. “Don’t think we should push ’em much faster’n we’d cover ground our own selves,” he said, “walking on our own two legs, that is.”

Root wagged his head as if confused by the logic. “What good is them horses, if’n we cain’t get upland faster’n we can walk without ’em?”

Ovatt reminded, “Best we all paid heed: we got two of them sons of bitches still behin’t us.”

“Them two don’t matter now,” Kingsbury said, gazing at the two worried boatmen. “Way I see it, the two behind us, they’ll keep on coming, no matter how slow or fast we get north for Nashville.” Turning to the youth, Hames said, “’Bout them horses—we all thank you for teaching us such a lesson, Titus Bass.”

How his heart felt all the bigger, touched with the warmth in the pilot’s words, when he had felt his heart slowly growing so icy throughout that long winter’s day. Cold and dying inside was just what he had feared hejiad become after killing another man. Maybeso the others had been right after all in how they’d talked it over in those frantic, hurried minutes while they’d gathered up what little they had been carrying north, climbing unsteadily aboard the slave hunters’ mounts. Maybe their wisdom was true: to kill a Injun or a Negra wasn’t of much consequence at all, like Ovatt said. But to kill a white man … now, that was something. Bass even saw it in their eyes, the subtle change in how they looked at him after that terrible instant of decision when he had squeezed the trigger and took another’s life.

As the hours had crawled past, he had slowly come to realize that Hezekiah knew the difference, perhaps even could feel the same confusion Bass suffered—maybe because of the physical contact between them throughout the day, the slave sitting directly behind him on that horse’s back the way he was.

So he was damned grateful for Kingsbury’s kindness that night at their fire holding winter’s cold at bay. Titus thought back on the way he had suffered the terrifying fear that Hames Kingsbury would slip away from him, what with how Beulah had said that rib was poking a hole through his lights … and that come right on the heels of mourning the loss of Ebenezer Zane.

As they sat at their fire and wrapped themselves in the steaming, soggy wool blankets, Titus reflected back on his sixteen winters, thought on friends who had crossed his trail. Try as he might, the only person he could recall ever truly wanting to spend time with him had been Amy. Even with all the confusion and disappointment she had caused in him, with all the shattered expectations between them, here now in these cold woods he nonetheless sensed some strong regret that things hadn’t worked out differently between them. Looking back, he realized she must surely have been his first true friend.

So terribly painful was it that in the end even Amy had turned out not to be what she professed to be.

Maybe—he brooded as he stared at the mesmerizing flames while the others talked in hushed tones and picked venison from their teeth with slivers peeled from a beech-nut tree—just maybe these crude, unlettered Kentucky boatmen were the first real friends he had ever had.

And of their number Ebenezer Zane had been the first to step up and offer his hand to Titus. After the river pilot’s death Hames Kingsbury had been the one to take up the slack in Titus’s rope. But not just him, the woman too: Beulah. Eventually even Ovatt and Root, both of whom came to stand by him as only friends would, no matter their rough and less than polished ways of expressing their affection and loyalty.

Still all in all, it wasn’t only the four of them. Titus looked now across the dancing flames at Hezekiah, suddenly reminded in this fire’s bright flare that the man was nearly as black as charred oak.

True enough, back home in Kentucky, Bass had known a few simple farming folk who owned a slave, maybe even a pair of them—purchased off a slave block somewhere farther to the south, then carted over the hundreds of miles to their new owners’ small farms, there to work out the long days of their miserable lives beneath a terrible yoke. This night such a tragedy was brought home to him with a metallic ache as he stared at the weary, worldly, yellowed eyes of the one an angry Annie Christmas had sold away as retribution. As he looked at that black face, Bass filled with a flush of sadness for Hezekiah, the many, many more like him: for all Negras he imagined would never know what it was to revel in the freedom one felt in simply walking into another valley for the first time, that unfettered luxury of setting off to go where one wanted to go.

All and still—Titus admitted to himself—it seemed there damned well weren’t that many white men who ever really hungered to experience that feeling of true freedom. How very few in number were those who set out, not knowing where their journey would take them, not knowing what they would learn along the way, what they would find if and when they got to the end of their quest.

Men who lived as if it did not really matter, reaching the end of the trail. Their lives measured only in the journey. Spirits cast upon the winds, like a feather dancing, dancing.

Better that his spirit were chanced to dance on the wind, than to be mired in a plot of upturned ground back in Boone County.

Here at that fire in the deep of those woods blanketing southern Tennessee, Titus was once again rock-certain the spirits of those few old wanderers still followed the ancient trails of a bygone time, trails once pounded by the hooves of the long-gone buffalo. Every bit as sure was he that the spirit of his very own grandpap had picked up and moved away from the ground that the man had come and settled upon in his youth, the land where Titus himself had been born and raised, the ground it seemed Thaddeus Bass would farm until the day he was buried beneath its thick, cold, loamy blanket. There at last his father’s soul would be at rest beneath the ground where he had labored his whole life through.

So unlike his grandpap’s own restless spirit cast out to dance on the wind: forever wandering in the wake of the west-seeking buffalo. That spirit never to find its rest until it had journeyed far enough to discover that mystical place where the sun laid its head at night, out there beyond the farthest reach of man’s most westward settlement. That old man’s spirit never to find peace until at long, long last it one day reached the land where the buffalo ruled.

Generations ago new settlers come to the canebrakes and the Cumberland had scared off and driven away what buffalo the Indians hadn’t yet killed. Yet with an unnamed certainty buried there in the core of him, Titus somehow knew the buffalo existed—out there, somewhere still. Undoubtedly it was a realm far enough away from the white settlers and town builders, well beyond all the school benches and church spires and small-town mercantiles, a land far gone, where those great mythical animals could at last wander free, every bit as free as the spirits of those who hunted for that faraway land where the buffalo reigned.

One day, perhaps. One day.

Four more frosty nights and four more grueling days later, as the sky wept a drizzle from low clouds, Bass stood silently staring down at the smooth gray river rock the Grinder family had heaped over an otherwise unmarked grave dug back in the woods no more than a few steps away from their roadside inn. All any of the three boatmen knew was the dead man’s name. Only that—along with how he and another had taken a Corps of Discovery west to the far ocean, crossing the high mountains and fighting raging rivers in the process, returning home in triumph and adulation in 1806. Story was that about a year ago in the fall of 1809 Meriwether Lewis had begun his journey east along the Natchez Trace.

“He come in here on that awful October night,” the elder Grinder loved to regale travelers with the hoary tale, pounding a fist into an open palm, “none of us knowing he ’tended to kill hisself right here and then.”

Here beneath this pile of cold, rain-washed river rock lay the final resting place of that daring young wanderer who had pointed the way west for Thomas Jefferson’s brave young country.

“Ol’ Grinder says the man shot hisself in the head—but didn’t do all that good a job,” Ovatt repeated the story now as they all stood beside the cairn, paying their respects. “So he called out, begging others to finish him ’cause he knew just how hard he was to kill.”

“How’d a man like him ever come to wanna take his own life?” Root asked. “Ever’ time I come up this here road and spend the night at Grinder’s Stand since it happened, it fair gives me the willies. Like I feel the man’s ghost hanging on round here.”

“A troubled soul perhaps,” Beulah replied.

“Maybeso he’d already been across’t them far mountains and out to the great ocean beyond it all,” Kingsbury attempted to explain, “so likely he figured there was nothing left for him to see. Gone and seen it all. I s’pose a man like that figures it’s just as well to snuff out his own candle.”

“Gotta hand him that,” Ovatt replied. “When there ain’t no more to see, maybe you’re right, Hames—no sense in going on, taking up room.”

With the clang of the iron gong suspended from the Grinders’ porch calling them to supper, Titus watched the others turn away from the grave, Kingsbury leading the rest back down the gentle slope to the gathering of squat cabins where they could take refuge from the drizzle and suffer the Grinder woman’s distasteful cooking. In moving off, Hezekiah looked back over his shoulder, stopped, then returned to stand quietly beside Bass at the cairn.

“You g’won now and get yourself something to eat,” he quietly told the slave.

“Folks ain’t gonna feed me with them others,” the slave said, wagging his head. “I’ll stay till you come down. We eat together.”

With a sigh Bass turned slowly. “I’m finished here, done trying to sort out why he done it.”

“Maybeso he was kill’t.”

His face rose as did the realization. Bass stared into Hezekiah’s yellowed eyes.

The slave continued. “Folks like them …”

“The Grinders?”

With a nod Hezekiah went on, “They just might’n figure a feller like this’un be carry him lots of money. ’Portant man like him allays got lots of money.”

While it seemed so far-fetched, Hezekiah’s explanation seemed probable at the same time. Bass replied sullenly, “So they kill’t him for it.”

“Then their kind go an’ bury the man ’fore anyone come round asking questions,” Hezekiah replied.

Wagging his head, Titus slowly shuffled away from that low pile of rock. “I ain’t hungry no more.”

Feeling as if his belly trapped a cold stone, Bass grappled with the greed and avarice of those he had encountered—whether it was pirates on the river or highwaymen haunting the Trace, or even the insatiable greed of stand owners like the Grinders.

Just what was it that made such men hunger after money more than love, more than adventure, more than happiness? Why did most men look for security in a full purse, while but a few searched for contentment beyond themselves in a land yet unseen? He laid his hand across the waistband of his britches as he watched the others take their pewter trenchers from one of the Grinder sons and stand at the stove while the old woman ladled out their supper. Perhaps the meaning of life came down to choosing gold, or the journey.

If need be, he decided, his would be the journey. Like his grandpap before him, he could live without the gold. His spirit must dance on the wind.

The next day they forded the Duck River at Gordon’s Ferry, now come eighty miles from Colbert’s Ford and the ambush by the Tennessee River. Another two nights in the wilderness of the Barrens brought them to the Big Harpeth River, where they slept in crude sheds erected near the house of the last American full-blood white man known to have lived between there and Natchez itself.

“We’re less’n thirty miles from Nashville,” Kingsbury explained as darkness came down like a cold, sodden blanket. “Place folks once called French Lick.”

It was there at Nashville they left the Natchez Trace and pushed on to the northeast, following a trail that left behind the Cumberland River, their feet plying a path long ago blazed by boatmen returning to the Ohio River country. From there they pushed into the highlands of Kentucky, fording the Great Barren River, then the Green. At each crossing they stripped off what they could, tying it up into tight bundles they carried over their heads, thereby allowing themselves something warm to pull on once they reached the far shore, where they built a fire and drove off the chill the winter sky was whipping overhead.

Then on to Nolins Creek and Elizabethtown. Beyond there few miles remained before they crossed the icy Salt River, drawing close to Louisville and the mighty Ohio itself. Come nearly a thousand miles through the wilderness by wagon, foot, and horseback.

“More land getting cleared every trip,” Heman Ovatt grumbled as they passed a growing number of settlers’ cabins the closer they drew to the bustling riverfront town.

“Folks cutting down the forest for corn and wheat,” Kingsbury replied.

“There’s more’n enough forest to go around,” Reuben Root argued. He swung his arm in an arc. “Lookit all this! You really figure they’ll ever cut down all of these?”

“Settlers gone and drove off most of the critters,” Bass said acidly. “I figure the trees just might be next to go.”

“Sounds to be you’re still nursing on sour milk over them buffalo,” Kingsbury said.

Root agreed. “Yeah—an’ you ain’t never see’d a buffalo neither.”

“Don’t need to,” Titus said, “to know they been drove off—gone out yonder someplace.”

“That where you’re fixing to take him?” Kingsbury asked, thumbing a gesture at Hezekiah.

“Ain’t taking him nowhere with me,” Bass replied. “He ain’t mine no more.”

“Then you must figure on setting him free?” Root inquired.

“Like I said I was.”

“Ain’cha got no use for a Negra?” Ovatt asked.

For a moment he looked into the slave’s yellowed eyes. Then Bass wagged his head. “I don’t wanna be tied down by him.”

“He’ll bring you a fine profit,” Kingsbury reminded.

“I ain’t sellin’ him,” Titus snapped. “Gonna have someone up to Louisville write me a paper to sign and give to Hezekiah, sayin’ to all what read it that the man been give his freedom.”

“Him were mine, I’d sell him,” Ovatt declared. “Good slave like him, bring top dollar this far north—”

“But he ain’t yours,” Bass interrupted. “An’ he ain’t mine no more. We get to Louisville tomorrow, I’ll give him his freedom papers like I said I would.”

“You’re a man good on your word,” Kingsbury added.

“Man ain’t good on his word,” Titus said, remembering a virtue taught him by his father, “man ain’t good on nothing.”

The following day when they reached the girdled trees that marked the outlying areas of a growing Louisville slowly extending into the forest, Titus Bass, true to his vow, searched out a local justice of the peace.

“You’re certain this is what you want to do?” asked the red-faced shop owner with neck jowls pouring over the top of his buttoned collar as he measured the tall Negro. He reminded Titus of an old turkey cock with so much neck-wattle recently scraped red with a shaving razor.

“Yes, sir. I do intend to do this.”

“Don’t know as I can do it, son,” the justice clucked.

“Why not?” he demanded.

“Like you said, you ain’t got you no paper giving you rightful ownership of this here Negra. Gives a man pause, it does—maybeso this Negra belongs to your daddy.”

“My pap never owned a slave in his life!”

His eyes narrowing in contemplation, the justice said, “Now, I don’t suppose we could talk with your daddy about this matter, could we?”

Feeling the first itch of anger growing in his breast, Titus answered, “My pap lives back in Boone County. But I don’t live there no more.”

“Maybe you run off to Louisville with your family’s Negra?”

“No!”

With a condescending smile the fat-necked justice wagged his head, saying, “But you got no way to prove the slave is yours to free.”

Burning with sudden anger, Bass whirled on Hezekiah and asked in a voice cracking with emotion, “Are you my slave?”

Hezekiah nodded glumly. “I’m your slave.”

“Makes you my property, right?”

“Yes, you my master.”

Whirling back on the justice, Bass said, “There it is. What more you need from us? This man knows who his master is—and his master gonna free him for all time. You don’t do it, I’ll find someone else who will.”

His scraped and scalded face turning crimson at the youngster’s rebuke, the justice rose from behind his cherrywood desk and slammed a hand down with a resounding thud that echoed in the small office to the side of his store. “That’s just what you’re gonna have to do then, sonny. I ain’t gonna have it on my conscience that I let a young boy like you go off an’ do something foolish: turning your Negra into a freedman! I’ll declare! Where you ever took a notion like that?”

Bass watched the fat-jowled man walk off, removing his sleeveless robe, returning to his shop next door. He stopped once, turned back on the two of them, and waved them out of his clapboard office. Bass turned to go, finding the boatmen pressing their noses against the murky panes of window glass, watching it all.

“So you get it done proper?” Root inquired when Titus and Hezekiah stepped out the door onto the board walk.

A gust of wind closed the door behind them. On the street again. In the cold. Bass looked up at the faces expectant of his answer. “Any of you got a idea where I can get me a paper says Hezekiah here is a freedman?”

Kingsbury rocked back on his heels, saying, “This be the only man what can do it right for you.”

“No matter now. I stay with you, Titus Bass,” Hezekiah replied. “Till we find right man to do it.”

Beulah wagged her head. “That old frog. Shame on him.”

“Ain’t no other but him,” Kingsbury argued.

“Sometimes, I declare, Hames—you’re so addleminded,” Beulah said, then turned to Titus to say quietly, “We just have to find us someone what can write.”

Turning to stare at the woman, Titus found himself dumbfounded by the simplicity of what she was suggesting. “You saying we get someone to write up a paper for us?”

Beulah’s eyes glanced at the boatmen before coming back to rest on Titus’s. “And we have ’em sign that old frog’s name to it.”

“That’s gotta be about as close to stepping outside the law as anything I ever heard!” Kingsbury complained.

“You get found out,” Ovatt squealed, “there’ll be stripes to pay on your back, Titus! Not just this here Negra’s.”

Beulah poked a finger into Kingsbury’s chest, saying, “And you’re telling me you ain’t ever done all sorts of foul things at the edge of the law?”

“I ain’t never used a goddamned man’s name to do anything wrong!”

“It ain’t wrong,” Beulah protested. “I figure it’s about as right as right can be.”

In that moment Titus felt as proud as he could be for her, the way she gave the three boatmen pause, struck them dumb, unable to convince her.

Kingsbury’s eyes blinked, as if he were working on something hard and fast behind them. “Right, or wrong—we get caught, this here is more serious’n causing a ruckus on a gunboat—”

“More serious’n killing a man—or a whore, Hames?”

“They was … she was fixing to kill us.”

“So it was the right thing to do,” Beulah said. “Just like this is the right thing for Titus here.” With the three boatmen silenced, each of them standing there gape-mouthed, she turned to the youngster. “Now, you remember what that justice man’s name was?”

Twisting his neck this way and that to search for some writing on the door or the window, Titus squinted, making sense of the letters and their placement. “Lu … ther L. P-pond.”

Seemingly of a changed mind, Kingsbury slapped an arm around Bass’s shoulder, his eyes darting up the street, then down. “Just get your paper writ up so we can get us over to Mathilda’s place.”

“Mathilda’s place?” Titus repeated.

“Don’t tell me you forgot awready,” Ovatt said.

Root snorted, “Hell, I’d a’figured Mincemeat made Titus here a real comeback customer of hers.”

“Hold on there, Hames Kingsbury! You ain’t taking me to no such a place!” Beulah scolded. “Never been in one before, an’ I don’t intend to start now.”

His palms coming up apologetically, Kingsbury started to explain, “Just a place where we can get us a square meal and a stout drink—”

“An’ half-dressed women all hanging off you too!” Beulah snapped. “Wanting to dip their hands in your purse.”

“But we got us old friends there,” Kingsbury protested.

“Not no more, you don’t.” And she crossed her arms, turning from him huffily.

The pilot stepped around to face her, but again she whirled from him. “Beulah?”

“You fixing on marrying me like you said, your whoring days is done, Hames Kingsbury.”

“M-marrying?” Root stammered. “That right—”

Kingsbury gestured for silence from them all as he took hold of Beulah’s shoulders. “Course I’m gonna marry you—”

“You won’t never again need no whore, Mr. Kingsbury,” the woman told him. “I’m going downriver with you every trip.”

With a mixture of excitement mingled with awe at the sudden announcement, Titus watched and listened as Beulah and the pilot finally declared what the two of them had been discussing for much of the long journey up from New Orleans.

Ovatt whirled on Root and asked, “An’ you’re telling me you didn’t know?”

“I … I knowed they was thick,” Reuben sputtered sheepishly.

“Yeah, real thick. ’bout as thick as your skull,” Ovatt said, then held his hand out to Kingsbury.

“Maybe you three ought’n go on over to Mathilda’s by yourselves,” the pilot said as they shook in turn, nodding at Beulah. “Me and the woman find us another place to bed in for the night.”

“Mean you’ll meet us down by the wharf come morning?” Root asked.

“Count on finding me there, waiting for all you late sleepers,” Kingsbury replied, glancing down with no small satisfaction as Beulah finally stepped to his side and threaded her arm through his. “This crew still got us a few miles left afore we get all the way back up the Ohio to Cincinnati, where I can buy us ’nother flatboat. Ain’t nothing changed my mind ’bout you an’ Heman still working the river with me.”

Root flicked a glance at Ovatt, then asked, “So you still figuring you need us?”

“Need you? Why, the hull lot of us been making a home on the river for years,” Kingsbury snorted.

Then Beulah leaned forward to say, “You think just because me and Hames gonna be a pair now that we don’t need you fellas? That it? Damned nonsense! If that’s what you’re thinking, you’re both crazy as a mad coon. Me being your pilot’s wife don’t change a thing.”

“But, well … there’s some fellers what’d be afeared of having a woman on their boat—not saying it’d be me, you unnerstant,” Root explained.

“Are you such a man?” Beulah asked.

Root smiled gamely and tried to shrug it off. “Maybeso you ain’t no more bad luck than anything else, Beulah.”

She leaned over to him and planted a kiss on Reuben’s cheek. “That mean you figure it’s awright for me to be part of your crew?”

While Root blushed, wide-eyed, Ovatt was the first to nod his head. Reluctantly, Reuben finally spoke up. “You’re part of the crew—just as long as you keep us fed and the coffee on.”

“I can do that,” Beulah replied as she slipped back beside Kingsbury. “And since Titus here ain’t gonna be part of the crew no longer, you’ll likely need me to spell you fellas on an oar or the gouger from time to time.”

A look of surprise crossed Ovatt’s face. “You do that man’s work too?”

“I been a boat pilot’s woman since I can remember,” she answered with a confident tilt to her chin. “So don’t you think I can put my hands to every chore on a flatboat, including taking my turn at the rudder?”

“See, boys?” Kingsbury said confidently. “Just like I found out for myself—this here’s one woman what can take care of her own self when it comes to a Kentucky broadhorn on the river.”

With a happy wag of his head Root cheered, “Looks like we’re back to being a foursome, it does at that!”

Ovatt nodded in agreement, saying, “When Ebenezer was kill’t, I figured Titus here was the one bound to fill out our crew. S’why I got real worried when he said he wasn’t gonna make a life on the river with us.”

“No matter that he’s going off on his own to do what he wants—now there’s four of us,” Kingsbury summed it up, then suddenly turned to the skinny youth. “Still, I wish I could find the words to make you wanna stay with us, Titus Bass.”

Titus struggled to explain how he wanted to press on, reaching for his dream. “Far back as I can remember, I been thinking on making for Louisville.”

Ovatt asked, “Come here to stretch your wings a bit?”

“Likely I will do that—if’n there’s any stretching left to do after that float down to Nor leans with the lot of you.”

“Out yonder lays a great big world, Titus—just waiting for you. And there’s allays the women and the whiskey while a young feller’s tasting it all,” Kingsbury said, stepping right up to Bass. “I’m gonna miss you.”

“Only till you get back down the Ohio come spring,” Bass reassured them, sensing a sour ball of sentiment begin to clog his throat.

“That’s right, Hames,” Root added. “Titus says he’s gonna be right here in Louisville where we can look him up every trip down.”

“Less’n Mincemeat kills him first!” Kingsbury joked, then clumsily threw his arms about the youngster. Into Titus’s ear he whispered, “You’ll take care of yourself now, hear?”

With the salty smart of his own tears and the sudden self-conscious silence surrounding them all, Bass could only nod, locked within the pilot’s crude embrace. He was unaccustomed to such a sharing of emotion between men. Finding this thing of hugging a strange custom, yet discovering that embrace made him feel truly accepted. There and then he thought back with some regret, wishing his father had been the sort to show just this sort of affection. Still after all, none of his family had ever stood on that physical side of things. Not even his mother, not with all that she said and did. None of his kin had ever been much taken with outwardly showing warmth and affection.

So much did that river pilot’s embrace mean to him that as soon as Kingsbury released him and took a step back, a sudden and chilling sense of loss swept over him. So much so that Bass was about to say he just might reconsider staying on with them—when Kingsbury reached up, tousled his hair, and gazed into Titus’s face.

With glistening eyes the pilot said, “Just look at you, son. Come a long way from being that poorly critter what walked outta the woods on our night fire way back last fall. Cain’t no man dare say you ain’t come a long way, Titus Bass.”

Try as he might to fight it, he could feel a tear escape from one eye, his lips quivering slightly as he fought to find the words—damning himself for such a childish display, angry at showing that sort of weakness here in the company of these strong men. But when he looked up, Bass saw Kingsbury’s tears spill into his short-cropped, matted blond beard.

The pilot swiped at them carelessly as Beulah gripped his arm tight, her own eyes red-rimmed and brimming. With a voice suddenly sounding like a door dragged over its sill, Kingsbury said, “We’ll see you here by the Ohio come late spring.”

In the next heartbeat he had Beulah turned and moving away into the fading light of that winter afternoon.

“C’mon, Titus,” Ovatt said, stoically refusing to let sentiment get the best of him as he grabbed hold of Bass’s arm. “We gotta get over to Mathilda’s and see if Mincemeat still remembers you.”

Locked there between the two boatmen sweeping off to have themselves a spree, Titus was pulled away a few steps before he realized he had forgotten someone.

He jerked to a stop, turning around there in the last reddish splash of winter’s afternoon sunlight, gazing back at the Negro. “You comin’, Hezekiah?”

With only a shrug of his big, broad shoulders, the slave answered, his head hung, chin to chest. Confused, Titus hurried back to him, saw the tracks of moisture tracing shiny indigo furrows down the tattooed ebony cheeks.

Softly, Titus asked, “You’re comin’, ain’t you?”

The big man answered, “You be going away from me soon, yes?”

“Hezekiah—I’m gonna see that you’re set free. Ain’t that what you want?”

“Free, yes. Free and go with Titus Bass.”

“Maybeso you ought’n not be free with me no longer,” Titus replied, trying to explain. “Maybeso you ought’n move on, go and try out your own wings now, Hezekiah.”

The big chert-black eyes sought his out with their moistness. “Then we say good-bye soon.”

“Not soon. Not tonight, anyways. Don’t have to be tonight. C’mon, you go with us over to Mathilda’s place. A fine place, with good food and lots of noisy folks.”

“T-titus,” Root began tentatively in a harsh whisper. “They don’t ’llow Negras in Mathilda’s place.”

“The hell they don’t!” Bass snapped indignantly. “I seen some back to the kitchen.”

“They the help. So that’s right where he can stay when we go in the place,” Ovatt suggested. “Back with Mathilda’s help.”

Titus turned on the slave. “That be awright with you? Get your meal and maybe a place to curl up for the night back in the kitchen?”

“Be good to eat,” he answered. “Good to find a warm place to sleep too.”

Titus patted the tall slave on the arm. “Then in the morning we find us someone what can write, to make out my paper says you’re a freedman now.”

“Damn!” Root exclaimed, slapping himself alongside the head. “Why didn’t I think of it sooner?”

Titus asked, “Think of what?”

“Mathilda her own self,” Root said, grinning. “She knows how to make her letters and cipher her numbers with the best of ’em. There ain’t many in Louisville gonna be any better’n her at it.”

A sudden relief washed over Bass, despite all the raw tearing away and loss. The whorehouse madam would be the one to inscribe for Hezekiah that handwritten gift of freedom, thereby lifting a yoke from Titus’s own neck with the same stroke of her quill. Now more than ever Bass realized no man should ever belong to another.

“There, Hezekiah!” he cheered. “Tomorry you’ll be a freedman. You can go where you want. When you want. Ain’t gonna belong to no man but your own self from then on.”

“But,” the big slave said, his eyes still brimming, “I allays belong to you.”

Bass shook his head. “No, don’t you understand? I’m freeing you. Don’t belong to no one no more. Never did belong to me.”

Hezekiah wagged his head emphatically. “No, Titus Bass. You not understand,” he replied sternly. “You go make me a freedman, sure enough. But in here”—and he again tapped a single finger against his chest—“no matter what: I allays belong to you.”